Archive for March 2014

First up, the Cadillac ELR TVC, with actor Neal McDonough boasting about the US’s consumer culture and past glories:

And now, Ford parodies it with a far more down-to-earth and realistic message about what we should be praising in the occident, starring environmental advocate Pashon Murray, who runs Detroit Dirt, a composting company:

The parody is quite enjoyable and I’ve a feeling this will appeal to a wider audience than the original. However, for those who haven’t seen the original, it’ll up its views. GM is unlikely to be displeased, and the Ford Grand C-Max (or just C-Max in the US) is not a direct competitor.
Even though it’s not original, the newer commercialâ€”sans Muhammad Ali and the Apollo programmeâ€”feels more responsible and in tune with where we are in the 2010s.

I must have had a busy end of 2013, as I never posted my trade-mark summary of the year as viewed via my Tumblr. Here â€™tis, better late than never.

January 2013Lucire has a facelift onlineâ€”by December 2013, this “new look” would be history. Kylie Minogue is on the home page as the first story with the new look. Seems very retro now.
Cliff Curtis plays a non-Māori with a standard American accent in Missing. Maybe no one really knows about New Zealand in Hollywood, unless you are Jemaine, Bret, or a Hobbit.
Kim Dotcom launches Megabox but itâ€™s still not fair or sustainable for content creators, says Russell Brown. You just don’t hear much about this these days.
Jaguar is happy that the Tata procedures’ manual is four sides of A4 instead of Ford’s three-inch thick one. Free from US bureaucracy, it now produces good cars. This might apply to other things concerning the US of A.

February 2013
Dick Prosser doesn’t get stood down by New Zealand First after racist comments, and Shearer and Key are OK with that, too. Prosser’s relieved he doesn’t work for TVNZ.
On Instagram, the OHMS hashtag reveals very little that is On Her Majesty’s Service.
Google claims that it cannot crawl for a file that never existedâ€”the first of some serious bugs from the search engine giant.

April 2013
One reviewer equates Bruce Willis’s John McClane in the new Die Hard movie with Mr Magoo: ‘Remember those old Mister Magoo cartoons where the doddery old bald guy would blunder around various locations, leaving chaos in his wake while constantly insisting “Iâ€™m on vacation”?’
Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was foretold in The Final Cut in the early 1990s. I watched it then. The remake was totally different. For a start, a lot of Thatcher Cabinet politicians now look like their Spitting Image caricatures.
Googlebot keeps making false accusations about malware, as I document Google’s latest folly. Why do people depend on this website? And, more to the point, isn’t libel covered by US law?
Adam Rayner and Eliza Dushku try to reboot The Saint in a remake, with Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy in cameos. The series is yet to be picked up.

June 2013
The Royal Wedding of HRH Princess Madeleine and Chris O’Neill. It becomes one of Lucireâ€™s most-read articles in June.
Edward Snowden becomes the whistleblower of the year. Later, when I am stuck at the Russian Embassy behind its gates in Wellington, I note that I was ‘snowed in’. Snowden has inspired new language.

July 2013
Dzohokhar Tsarnaev gets on the cover of Rolling Stone. People complain that Rolling Stone glamorized him without reading the story which doesn’t glamorize him. Some media cover this without mentioning this point.
PM John Key dismisses GCSB protesters as misinformed or politically aligned.
The death of Mel Smith. Will Matt Lucas still dress up as Andy Pipkin?

August 2013
Facebook and Instagram stop people from saying thank-you, either failing such comments or calling them abusive.
Stuart Munro writes, at the al-Jazeera English website: ‘The major driver of the GCSB bill has been the improper use of the agency by John Key. This bill was thrown together on the ï¬‚y to cover the PMâ€™s embarrassment arising from his misuse of GCSB resources to spy on Kim Dotcom. With an honest PM, the legislation might not be problematicâ€”but Key makes personal and intemperate use of the GCSB. He is therefore incapable of providing impartial oversight to the GCSB, and that leaves this bill fatally ï¬‚awed. It will have to be scrapped, and the current GCSB will have to be disestablished in favour of a more scrupulous organisation.’

October 2013Doctor Whoâ€™s 50th anniversary special is coming. I eventually watch it on Iplayer after testing it out watching Strictly. This reminds me of how much Britain has changed in the last 30 years. Today, Bruce Forsyth is on BBC1 on a Saturday night, Terry Wogan is on the radio, and Tories are in Number 10. Nothing like it was before.
Google breaks another promise. In 2005, it stated, ‘There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, ï¬‚ashy, graphical doodads ï¬‚ying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.’

November 2013
The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, which must also mean the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.
The origins of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air are revealed in this fictional entry by yours truly: ‘To entertain the populace during the Troubles, The Fresh Prince of Bel Fast was a Northern Irish sitcom about a young Catholic man from Derry who is forced to live with a Protestant family to the east of Belfast. It later spawned an American remake starring Will Smith. It was known for its theme, which concluded, “I looked at my kingdom, I was there at last / To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Fast.”‘

December 2013
Pinterest puts spammers into your feed.The Hobbit cartoon in the 1970s was a much quicker way to get Tolkien’s novel dramatized: in and out in 90 minutes.
There ain’t nothing like a Dame: Penelope Keith gets a DBEâ€”and I mark this with a Morecambe & Wise clip. Seems appropriate.

I have followed very little mainstream media coverage of Malaysian Airlines’ flight 370, apart from National Radio. It seems that not paying attention to mainstream media has made me clearer about what might have happened to it.
All those way-out theories never held any sway for me. Or the idea about tracking cellphones or some of them clicking through to voicemail being a sign that the passengers were alive: don’t most cellphones do this when you are out of range? These just appeared to have been cooked up through sensationalism, by some media outlets wanting to fill air time or pages. The Malaysian government has managed to mess things up even further so there are meta-stories: stories within the story.
Only two articles made it on to my Facebook wall, since Facebook appears to be the new Digg. The first was an engineer with a Ph.D., entitled, â€˜Flight 370 did not explode; it vanishedâ€”really? That is your scientific argument?’. This was written three days after the aeroplane disappeared and kept things rather simple: the plane did not just vanish because that is a scientific impossibility. The writer goes on to explain why the black box signal had not been located, rationally and expertly. She believes that the plane could have gone down for an attempted emergency landing.
The second was posted today on my wall, via Robert Catto. An experienced pilot, Chris Goodfellow, points out some basic facts on his Google Plus account. Goodfellow begins:

A lot of speculation about MH370. Terrorism, hijack, meteors. I cannot believe the analysis on CNNâ€”almost disturbing.

He obviously shares my concern at how the media have been filling us with water-cooler junk, and proceeds to have a simpler explanation. He continues (sic):

Two days later we hear of reports that Malaysian military radar (which is a primary radar meaning the plane is being tracked by reflection rather than by transponder interrogation response) has tracked the plane on a southwesterly course back across the Malay Peninsula into the straits of Malacca. When I heard this I immediately brought up Google Earth and I searched for airports in proximity to the track towards southwest. The left turn is the key here. This was a very experienced senior Captain with 18,000 hours. Maybe some of the younger pilots interviewed on CNN didn’t pick up on this left turn. We old pilots were always drilled to always know the closest airport of safe harbor while in cruise. Airports behind us, airports abeam us and airports ahead of us. Always in our head. Always. Because if something happens you don’t want to be thinking what are you going to doâ€”you already know what you are going to do. Instinctively when I saw that left turn with a direct heading I knew he was heading for an airport. Actually he was taking a direct route to Palau Langkawi a 13,000 foot strip with an approach over water at night with no obstacles. He did not turn back to Kuala Lampur because he knew he had 8,000 foot ridges to cross. He knew the terrain was friendlier towards Langkawi and also a shorter distance.

Goodfellow theorizes there was a mid-air fire and the plane did not make it, but that it was heading to Langkawi after the emergency broke out.
Instinctively, this tragedy seems like a deeply unfortunate mid-air accident, and while these other theories might help families believe their loved ones are alive somewhere, I am sorry to say that I believe the two simplest explanations above. Of course, I would like the truth to come forth earlier so, if these experts are right, these families can commence mourning. Taking them through these unlikely possibilitiesâ€”a hijacking with the plane descending below radar and landing on some Lost island among themâ€”seems cruel and irresponsible.

PS.:Esquire has a complementary editorial on the mainstream media reportingâ€”which apparently now includes a supernatural possibility. I’ve also head one where MH370 supposedly flew perfectly under another aeroplane, thereby evading detection. I’m delighted not to have entertained either first-hand.â€”JY

At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of Moskvaâ€”Moscowâ€”to protest their governmentâ€™s actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the countryâ€™s actions â€˜the shame of Russiaâ€™.
A friend provided me with photos of the protest that he and his friends took, which I uploaded to my personal Facebook profile this morning.Within minutes, they vanished from my wall. Facebook has replaced them with a message to say my page cannot be loaded properly, and to try again. Seven hours later, the problem persists.
They are still on the mobile edition but Iâ€™ve noticed that, for a public post, very few people have seen them.
What is curious is whether Facebook has some mechanism to remove content. I remember some years ago, video content vanished, too, with Facebook making false accusations that I had uploaded copyrighted materialâ€”despite my having express authorization. I had to fight Facebook, which had adopted a guilty-till-proved-innocent approach, to keep up content I was legally entitled to upload and share. Facebook presented me, for months, with a massive notice on my home page each time I logged in, where I had to fill in a counter-notification daily to their false accusations.
I had understood that generally copyright owners had to complain first under US law, unless, of course, your name is Kim Dotcom and US lobbyists want to make an example of you.
So we know that Facebook does have mechanisms to take things off without any complaint being filed. And we also know there are algorithms limiting sharing.
Given the speed with which this vanished today, I doubt anyone would have complainedâ€”and Iâ€™m hardly a target for those interested in Russian politics.
I have since uploaded the album to my Facebook fan pageâ€”where it has not been deleted, but stats for it do not show up. Thanks to Facebookâ€™s actions, Iâ€™ve uploaded the five images to my Tumblr as wellâ€”and here they are again, for your interest.
We can credit Facebook for ensuring that these images were more widely shared.